Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Impressions

Unreal Tournament is a series with history, grounded in the deep, misty origins of the first-person, multiplayer shooter genre.

The series, which began back in 1998 as a singleplayer game, has grown into two semi-separate franchises; Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The latter franchise, which focuses on multiplayer combat is one of the most played multiplayer games and is a firm favourite among those of us who just can’t get the hang of Counter-Strike.

The story for the Unreal Tournament games is limp, boring and thankfully not at all important. I’m lead to believe that it’s to do with mining colonies which used gladiatorial combat as a kind of entertainment. The company which runs these colonies, the Liandri Mining Corp., soon cottoned on to the idea and quickly took control of the sport, using it as an effective way to keep the population docile and happy.

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The Tournament then grew into a blood sport of incredible popularity, replacing all other sport in the galaxy and involving massive battlefields with sophisticated weaponry and dozens of combatants at a time.

Like I said – limp and boring. The kind of thing which you wouldn’t watch if it were on TV unless you were playing some sort of drinking game. Thankfully, the story isn’t at all critical to the game and serves only as a way to provide a context to the beautifully realised gameplay and salivatingly good graphics.

In fact, the story is only really even mentioned in the singleplayer game which pits players against a multitude of increasingly difficult bots. It’s only really there for n00bs to train with and to act as a consolation prize for those that buy the game and then realise they don’t have a internet connection or any friends to LAN with.

You see, multiplayer is where it’s at.

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Unreal Tournament 3 is, confusingly, the fourth instalment in the Tournament series and the games are actually numbered after the engine version and not after the actual number of games. That’s why Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 are numbered that way – they both use the same engine.

Anyway, back on topic, we recently seized a chance to play the PC Beta Demo version of Unreal Tournament 3 – by which I mean that I played it when Tim wasn’t looking. The full game will come with six game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, CTF, Duel, Warfare (Conquest) and Vehicle CTF. Of those we got to try Duel, Vehicle CTF, DM and Team DM.

The game will be coming out on the PC (late 2007), PlayStation 3 (early 2008) and Xbox 360 (mid 2008), has such a massive community that we just had to come back to you with our thoughts, so check them out by flipping the page...

Midway and bit-tech.net have joined forces to bring you a fantastic competition which gives you a chance to win a custom painted UT3 case mod and one of ten copies of the full game. All you have to do is answer a simple question!

We recently had a chance to talk to Mark Rein, VP for Epic Games, at the European launch for Unreal Tournament 3. Over the course of many beers, we discussed the PS3, PhysX and the future of Epic - so check out the interview inside.